A method and a corresponding apparatus of the general type referred to above are described, for example, in DE-OS 23 09 837 and DE-OS 28 08 048, which correspond to U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,872,897 and 4,221,243, respectively, and the transfer tool mentioned above basically comprises a hollow cylinder, having longitudinal slots therein, onto which the coil windings are slipped from the former during the winding operation. Under favorable circumstances, such an apparatus can also be used for the winding of coils comprising parallel wires, if only a few parallel wires are involved and the longitudinal slots of the transfer tool are wide enough to accommodate the wires which are caused to twist during winding by means of a rotating wire guidance element (a so-called flyer) and a stationary former. It should be understood that although such twisting or stranding of parallel wires occurs, it is, however, basically undesirable. Moreover, as the number of parallel wire is increased, a limit is very quickly reached at which the relatively thick coil windings formed from the twisted parallel wires no longer fit into the narrow longitudinal slots of the transfer tool.
Winding methods and apparatus are also known wherein parallel wires are wound onto a rotating former by means of a wire guidance element which is non-rotatable, and subsequently the complete coils are transferred onto a stator by means of a transfer tool so that the parallel wires do not twist. In this case, however, the coils windings cannot be slipped from the former onto the transfer tool during the actual winding stage. For this reason, the short formers that are customarily used cannot be employed and hence coils arranged in an offset manner around the periphery of the stator and interconnected by the uninterrupted wire, cannot be manufactured by this apparatus.